Calling Conrad Tester! Calling Conrad Tester!

The “Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012” (HR 4089) is one of a long list of bills that are part of a full frontal attack on our wilderness system. When I was working these issues back in the 1990’s, the ever-present threat was the loggers, who like so many others, cannot conceive of the concept “enough.” They wanted everything, every log, and the idea of setting land apart merely to preserve it was foreign to them. That is the ethos of the corporation, and while corporations are comprised of human beings, corporations manifest the worst aspects of humans – greed and indifference to nature and human aesthetics. In fact, that is what corporate structure promotes, and what the law mandates – profit before all.

Loggers are still with us, and presented their agenda (again – it’s old wine in a new bottle) in Sen Jon Tester’s (D-MT) “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,” like the Heritage Act, a name crafted around a long oak table in a room deep in the bowels of an ad agency. Their job is to sell, and the naming of a bill (Clear Skies, anyone?) is as important as any other aspect of getting anti-social, anti-commons, anti-community legislation passed.

SHA2012 does the following, according to Wilderness Watch of Missoula:

HR 4089 would give hunting, fishing, recreational shooting, and fish and wildlife management top priority in Wilderness, rather than protecting the areas’ wilderness character, as has been the case for nearly 50 years. This bill would allow endless, extensive habitat manipulations in Wilderness under the guise of “wildlife conservation” and for providing hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting experiences. It would allow the construction of roads to facilitate such uses and would allow the construction of dams, buildings, or other structures within Wildernesses. It would exempt all of these actions from National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review. Finally, HR 4089 would remove Wilderness Act prohibitions against motor vehicle use for fishing, hunting, or recreational shooting, or for wildlife conservation measures.

In other words, the bill overrides every important provision of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Wilderness advocates are always playing defense. Industry comes at them from every conceivable angle, so that Tester’s FJRA is merely another industry push using a different vehicle. Such thrusts used to come from former Sen Conrad Burns, defeated by Tester in 2006.

So it should come as no surprise that the authors of this bill in looking for a senate sponsor (it has already passed the house) are knocking on the door of Jon Tester. This message came to me from Matt Koehler:

According to some news reports, Senator Tester is the guy the NRA and Safari Club are hoping will sponsor the bill in the Senate. They’ll need Democrat support and Tester is a target for obvious reasons. People should also be aware that the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Boone and Crockett Club and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership are pushing to pass the bill.

This serves to emphasize again that there are no protections for our commons in the two-party-one-financier system.

There are some stoic characters behind our wilderness system – Frank Church, Ken and Florence Baldwin, Jon Muir and Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold and the Archduid, David Brower. These are the big names, but wilderness as we know it came about because of thousands of like-minded activists who worked together to exert pressure on elected officials to get the bill passed. It’s a shame that certain wilderness areas carry the names of Lee Metcalf and Frank Church – good men though they were, public lands should not be named after them. They were mere servants. Far better to have a River of No Return Wilderness or Bear Trap Canyon or Spanish Peaks than to name our precious heritage after mere politicians.

But our forebears knew to play to ego to get bills passed. I long ago suggested, in this vein, that the Berkeley Pit in Butte be renamed the Conrad Burns-Max Baucus National Recreation Area. Perhaps if we named something after Tester, he would back off. So in honor of his post-election treatment of environmentalists, I suggest that area northwest of Missoula be renamed the “Jon Tester Great Burn Wilderness.” Maybe that will pacify him.